Sunday 26 April 2009

Week 20/04- 26/04

We were back from Easter holiday on Monday and submitted our 10 premises for a 7 min film to Richard. I was not looking forward to the group story telling exercise, considering how easy it is mess up any of the lines and somebody will make you go back and change it. Eventually only 3 of 10 sheets altogether survived. Funnily enough, 2 of them were about a hamster and a rat! The class loves animals. The third one was about a quiet part-time piano teacher who desperately wants to please everyone. From this exercise we learned that a good story needs a flawed character, a big enough inciting incident and a very good external goal. Usually this was missing in the other stories which didn't get through. We also talked more about dialogue and its purpose. In that sense, Closer and Good Fellows are very different in the characters' dialogue, but in the same time both films bring us easily into the characters' world through that dialogue.
In the afternoon, Kim Miller was teaching us what to look for in a good, organized storyline. Our homework was to make a short term storyline about Dev. It sounds boring, but after watching 5 episodes of Corie I got into it.

Tuesday was supposed to be an editing class which didn't happen again. I hope we learn how to edit. Really!
In the afternoon was history of cinema class, covering the period after WW2 and the beginning of Star System. Oblivious to the consequences, James Stewart or his manager started it all. And now we have to pay at least 7 mil. for a famous actor. We also discussed the small necessities of the soldiers coming back from war- a car, a house and a fridge! How simple and logical!But I would say a job comes at first place. This brings us further to the target audience of cinema in those days: teenagers, since the elder people were perfectly satisfied with a TV and didn't feel like going out after the long working day. Such factors bring in packaging of films and their theater presentation. In fact, it turned out to be quite a successful idea, considering that a good graphic poster, which has nothing to do with the film's content, would sell the tickets. Other good examples of packaging are Disney and Hitchcock, since we all know what the films are about just by hearing the name of the author.

Wednesday was a screening of "The best years of our lives". There will be another post for it.

On Thursday we were off, researching the characters from Corie and plotting their future liaisons.
On Friday was Abigail's class on producing. We took a script and started filling out some sheets to estimate what we need for a production. I find it quite helpful in terms of organizing the schedule much more precisely and it also saves money! Of course not everything was clear, but it starts to clarify step by step

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